In this blog, we’re going to discuss what SMS marketing is, who is it for, how to use it, the tools to perform SMS marketing, and how is it going to benefit your business.
If you’ve landed on this blog, I believe you’re searching for the answers to the questions related to SMS Marketing.
Do you know what the important Metrics are that determine the success of a campaign?
Out of so many, Engagement is one of the most important metrics, and you’ll be amazed to know that SMS marketing is winning the battle in terms of engagement.
Open rates for text messages are 98 percent and for emails, it’s just 20 percent, you can measure the difference yourself.
Are you getting interested to know more about this amazing marketing strategy?
Let’s start by knowing the meaning of SMS Marketing!
What is SMS Marketing?
SMS Marketing is a type of marketing strategy in which marketing messages such as promotional and transactional are sent through text messages (SMS).
Everyone receives a lot of text messages in a day regarding offers, discounts, updates, and transactions.
Sometimes we get a lot of text messages but I’m sure everyone opens every text message at least once to check if there’s something valuable, this makes text messages one of the most popular forms of marketing strategy in terms of engagement.
The other reasons behind the highest open rates of text messages are we see our mobile phones at least 344 times a day, and 70% of people prefer communicating with their favorite brands via text messages. Because of the use of mobile phones and text messages, SMS Marketing is also considered a mobile marketing strategy.
As we’ve already discussed that the open rate of text messages is 98%, and for email marketing, it is 20 percent. But you’ll be shocked to know that for PPC average click-through rate (CTR) is only 2%, but for text messages, the average click-through rate (CTR) is 30%.
Let’s add some more fascinating words regarding SMS marketing, do you know that 90% of text messages are read within 3 minutes of delivery, and half of the global population use SMS marketing for their daily conversations?
Getting excited about implementing this marketing strategy for your business? But hold on to your horses, complete knowledge makes the path easy and clear.
So, let’s move on and understand the purposes for which SMS marketing is an arrow that never misses its goal!
The usefulness of SMS Marketing
SMS marketing can be used for several purposes. It is so much useful when you want to increase the CTR and customer engagement in no time and at a low cost. Some of the measure operations that are performed through SMS Marketing are;
1. Running Promotional Campaigns
If you’re in a hurry of getting immediate user attention and engagement to promote your new products and services, then you can make use of SMS Marketing.
2. GeoFencing Promotions and Alerts
GeoFencing marketing is done with the help of geolocation API. If you want to know more about GeoFencing you can have a look at our blog, “GeoFencing”.
In GeoFencing when we get to know that the consumer is roaming in a particular geographical area and the physical store of the brand is located in that geographical area, then GeoFencing takes the help of SMS Marketing in sending users an alert to give a visit to the store.
Here, more than 3 marketing strategies are overlapping with each other such as GeoFencing Marketing, SMS Marketing, Local Business Marketing, Mobile Marketing, etc.
3. Updating Consumers regarding events in a real-time
Let’s understand this with an example. Assume, you’re organizing an event and because of some unnatural or unexpected reasons, there are some changes in the schedule of the event or any other modification, or in the worst scenario, the event is being canceled. How would you update your consumers regarding this?
I hope you’ll not go with email marketing or any other marketing channels as they’re not as fast as text messages. Here, SMS marketing will update your consumers with 100% accuracy, and this way you’ll be able to save your brand’s reputation.
4. Reminders
Reminding your consumers about their appointments is a good tactic to save both your mental peace and time. Often it’s been seen if the consumers are not being reminded about their appointment either they show up late or they don’t show up. This is the wasting of company resources along with losing peace of mind. If you want to save both of them, you can put automated reminders and keep reminding your audiences about their appointment.
5. Internal Alerts
Internal organizational communication should be smooth and fast to execute the tasks on time. This also helps in emergency times when you want to send a large number of employees an alert regarding your emergency protocols. With the help of SMS marketing, you can also convey information to the teams about the new projects that will be going to handle by a particular team.
6. Transactional Messaging
Transactional Messaging is done in the field of eCommerce. These types of messages are sent to individuals and are triggered by a certain event or behavior.
Some of the most important transactional messages that are sent through SMS Marketing are;
- order confirmations
- order bagged notifications
- dispatch notifications
- tracking information
- delivery updates
- order fulfilled notifications
You can see that the eCommerce industry uses SMS Marketing through every step. You can ask any business person who’s running a business in the retail or clothing industry or any kind of eCommerce business about the usefulness of SMS Marketing in the business.
You’ve seen that SMS Marketing is being used in several ways, now let’s have a sharp look at the businesses where it should be used and where it can be avoided.
Which businesses are most suitable for SMS Marketing?
Do you want to know if your business should implement this marketing strategy or not?
Well, the answer to this question is “it depends”. It depends on the industry, niche, and domain you’re working in. It depends on whether you’re providing products or not. It depends if your product is physical or virtual. It depends on a lot of things. But you have the right to decide if it’s best suitable and profitable for your business or not. Here, we at DigiAvtar are providing the list of some of the businesses where this marketing strategy is so much more suitable and profitable, and if you’re in any of those businesses you can go for it wholeheartedly and with 100% confidence.
- Ecommerce Industry
- Retail Industry
- Online Clothing Brands
- Online Pharmacies
- Travel Agencies
- Real Estate
- Businesses requiring appointments
- Financial Sector
- Companies with large employees
The above-mentioned businesses and business environments are where you can implement this marketing strategy without thinking much about the type of your business.
Ecommerce brands, clothing brands, the retail industry, and pharmacies can use SMS marketing for promotional campaigns, and order updates such as places, bagged, dispatched, out for delivery, and delivered. It’s the most convenient way for them to interact with the users at every step of the process.
In the travel business, it helps travel agencies in communicating updates such as flight time changes, cancellations, gate changes, weather alerts, etc.
The real estate industry can use it to send notifications regarding the availability of the properties and discounts & offers that a brand is providing on them.
Services businesses can use it for sending reminders to their consumers for the appointment slots they’ve booked so that they can show up on time. For some unknown or unexpected reasons, if they plan to reschedule their slot then that slot can be given to another consumer while it’s time.
Financial Sector uses it for improving its consumer experience making financial transactions safer and faster. The financial sector uses it for 2FA and for sending transactional text messages.
In the same way, large companies can use it for internal communications and the fast distribution of information.
Some of the industries where SMS Marketing isn’t the most viable option for marketing are;
- Blogs, if the blogger is using it for just promoting the blogpost contents on the website then it’s not a good option. Here, E-mail marketing will be a better option than SMS Marketing. But it can be used in blogging as well if you want to sell affiliate products or some of your own digital and physical products.
- It’s also not a good option for Forums & Online Communities.
- It’s also not good for portfolio websites as well.
We know now for what purposes and what businesses SMS marketing is most suitable for, now we’ll be discussing the most important tips/best practices and strategies to keep in mind while performing SMS marketing for your brand
Best practices for performing SMS Marketing for your brand
Some of the best tips/ practices and strategies you should keep in mind and perform are the following;
- Only send text messages to those consumers who’ve given their consent to receiving text messages. Don’t start sending SMS without a clear opt-in, it’ll reduce the engagement and CTR, build a negative impact in the market, and will cost you your marketing budget. Send only those who’ve given you permission, it’ll not be invasive this way.
- Decide a good time. As we know that 90% of text messages are read within 3 minutes of their delivery so it’s not right to spam your audiences at inappropriate times. Decide a time when your audiences should be available to have a look at the text messages without getting irritated and at the time when your products and services are needed the most.
- Use Multimedia content rather than just texts. It’ll grab your users’ attention in a more effective way and will help you build credibility.
- Mention your brand’s name in the text messages and other multimedia content such as photos and videos. Mentioning the brand name will make consumers think that the SMS has been sent by the brand and they can click on the shortcodes without any worry. You can identify your brand name by putting your brand name with a colon before starting the message such as “DigiAvtar: ….etc”
- If you don’t let your consumers know what they should do next, then they’ll just leave the message box without interacting further with the brand and taking the next step. So, have a clear call to action in the SMS whether you want website traffic, registrations for an event, driving click-through rates, or sales for your product and service.
- Are you forgetting the word count? Don’t, do you know you can only send a text message of a maximum of 160 characters? Identify your brand, get to the point, use shortcodes (get the help of link shorteners), and call to action and options for opting out. Be clear and concise.
- Give consumers an option for opting out of the messaging. Keeping an opting-out option is becoming a legal requirement because SMS Marketing is so much intrusive and invasive. It’ll save you from ill-reputation in the market that’ll be the result of sending the text messages again and again who didn’t opt out or who don’t want to be subscribed anymore. So include an opting-out option and save yourself from losing consumers. You can include an opt-out option for every type of text messaging.
Some of the other complementary things to keep in mind are the following;
- SMS marketing is best suitable for promoting Coupons, exclusive offers, and deals.
- You can get useful user insights by running different types of polls and can use these insights for your other marketing purposes.
- You can run contests so that your consumers can engage with your brand by participating in sweepstakes contests. You can even collaborate with other brands to cross-promote each other.
- Make use of marketing automation. Marketing automation saves your time and delivers efficient results.
- Generate leads through different types of campaigns such as FB Lead Generation, YouTube ads, Instagram ads, or Google ads for opting in consumers for SMS Marketing.
- Make use of drip marketing in your SMS Marketing. Drip marketing is one of the great strategies that are dependent on triggers. Whenever one event is triggered, an activity associated with that trigger is executed. Drip marketing isn’t just one single text message but a series of so many tailored responses based on the triggers (actions consumers are taking). In simple words, send another text message if the consumers are engaging with the previous ones. Because of the use of Drip Marketing Campaigns, it’s also considered a mobile inbound marketing strategy.
Paid attention to the best practices and strategies mentioned above? These are the important things that are very necessary to keep in mind while going out with SMS Marketing.
Now, let’s see some of the major advantages you can get from SMS Marketing!
Advantages of SMS Marketing
As we’ve already seen that SMS Marketing can be coupled with other marketing strategies very well such as GeoFencing Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, and Local Business Marketing. SMS Marketing provides the next level of communication and boosts business performance by improving consumer engagement and experience.
The benefits you can get from SMS Marketing are;
- Improved Brand Awareness and Reputation
- Improved Consumer Engagement and Experience with Interactive and Engaging SMS Campaigns
- Optimized Delivery by delivering to the right person at the right time
- Provides 98% of Open rates and 30% of click-through rates (CTR)
- Strengthen Reliability and reduce cost as the Open Rates and CTR are at their highest peak
- Automate inbound campaigns
- Helps in getting real-time feedback
- Ubiquitous for Smartphones
- Break the communication barriers by directly establishing a connection with the consumers
- Complements other marketing strategies such as Email Marketing, Local Business Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, GeoFencing Marketing, and Mobile Inbound Marketing.
- Increased Conversion and Sales
- Exponential Growth
- Increased Revenue
You can see how many benefits SMS Marketing can provide to its consumers.
But you must be wondering how to perform these strategies.
Don’t put yourself under so much pressure, you’re a very precious one. We’re moving ahead to discuss some of the best marketing software and basic steps of performing SMS marketing.
Some of the best and most simple SMS Marketing tools
Tools are for making your life easier by performing tasks in less time and cost. Here’s the list of some of the best tools that can help you in collecting phone numbers along with running the campaigns;
- SendPulse
- SendInBlue
- WC – APG SMS Notifications
- Waymore.io
- SparkCentral by Hootsuite
- Mailigen
- OmniSend
- TextMagic
- Attentive
- Avochato
Here, we’ve provided you the list of the 9 most popular easy-to-use tools for SMS Marketing, you can choose the best one for you. We’re also providing here the basic steps somewhat in every tool to run your SMS Marketing Campaign. As it is a basic approach so it may differ according to the UI of different platforms. The steps of the approach are;
- Sign in to the account
- Choose the plan
- Start your campaign
- Create a contact list
- Design the Text Message
- Execute the Campaign
You can take help from the above-mentioned basic steps to execute your campaign successfully. I believe we’ve discussed everything related to SMS Marketing, now let’s wrap up the blog here!
Takeaways
In conclusion, SMS marketing is a field of marketing where text messages are being used for sending promotional and transactional text messages.
Promotional messages are broadcasted to the masses i.e. “one-to-many”, while transactional messages are sent to individuals i.e. “one-to-one”. Transactional messages are triggered by some event or behavior.
Examples of transactional messaging are order confirmation and delivery notifications. Examples of promotional messaging campaigns are coupons, sales, event details, updates, weather alerts, etc.
SMS marketing can be coupled with any other marketing strategies and enhances the effectiveness of other marketing strategies as well. You just need the phone numbers of your clients to perform this marketing strategy. I know getting phone numbers from clients is harder than getting their emails, but still, you can spend some budget first on advertising to get consumers’ mobile numbers and permission to send them text messages.
Once you have data, you can start the SMS marketing campaigns.
Are you confident enough to run a successful SMS marketing campaign? If you still have questions in mind, then do let us know in the comment section below!
If you want to get the marketing strategy of your brand handled by professional SMS marketers, then you can connect with the experts of Team DigiAvtar. Digiavtar is a digital marketing agency in Gurgaon Haryana offering internet marketing services all over the world with the help of its expert professionals (from all over the world).
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